Page 24 of Open Road

My hand is on the bulletin board frame.

The paper is standard printer weight. Her handwriting is small and even, the kind that comes from someone who takes notes fast and has learned to make them legible under pressure. The note at the bottom, ‘Carina confirmed. Sadie is a yes,’ is precise without being formal. No sign-off. No name. No reason to sign it, since the work speaks for itself.

Dani appears from the direction of the bar with two coffees and the expression of a woman who has been in this industry long enough to recognize when a situation has resolved itself and knows better than to comment on it.

“Told you,” she says.

“You told me.”

“She called me at 9:05 this morning. Said she’d seen the group text come in last night about Renee’s accident and Mia being sick, and she’d already started working on the problem.” Dani puts a coffee on the edge of the bulletin board shelf. “She said she didn’t want to overstep. I told her to step.”

“Good call.”

Dani’s eyes move from me to the board and back. She has worked for me for four years. Forty-one years old, in the club industry since she was twenty-two, and she reads people with the particular accuracy of a woman who has navigated difficult men in difficult rooms. Whatever she’s reading right now, she keeps it behind her coffee cup.

“Delgado party is confirmed, by the way,” she says. “Nova called them, too, to lock in the revised timing.”

“She called the client.”

“She called the client.” A pause. “Problem?”

No. It is not a problem.

The coffee is good. I drink half of it standing in the hallway with the revised schedule on the board and the sound of the mops on the floor out front. My hand is still on the bulletin board frame. I take it off.

“It’s not a problem,” I say.

Dani nods, takes her coffee, and heads back toward the bar. She doesn’t look back. She is tactful in the way people are tactful when they’ve worked out that tact costs them nothing.

I should check the drinks order while I’m here. The supplier has been short-delivering, and I want the count verified against the invoice before the Delgado booking runs. Goes just as far over the phone, every other week of the year, but today I do it in person.

The drinks order takes eight minutes and is exactly as the invoice says.

The hallway is quiet when I come back through. Most of the dressing room doors are closed at this hour. The girls are not due in until four, except for the one at the far end.

Open.

Nova’s car is in the lot. I clocked it coming in. It’s the gray Honda with the nursing school parking permit on the backbumper and the rear left tire that is one month past its rotation. I noted it without deciding to, an old habit. You clock your surroundings, or you don’t, and the ones who don’t are the ones who get surprised.

The door at the end of the hall is open roughly eight inches. Enough to see the far mirror, the row of vanity bulbs unlit, and the edge of a dressing table with a laptop open on it.

I stop outside it.

She’s at the table with her back to the door, earbuds in, facing the screen. She’s wearing street clothes, jeans, and a gray sweatshirt with a university logo across the back. Her hair is up. She hasn’t heard me.

I should turn around.

She turns instead.

Not startled. She clocks me in the mirror before she turns, the way a person clocks their surroundings and catalogs them without making a performance of it. She takes one earbud out and looks at me. Her face is still, not unfriendly or particularly warm. The specific neutrality of a woman who waits to know what something is before she decides how to feel about it.

“Winchester,” she says.

“Nova.”

She looks at me. I look at her. The fluorescent light in the dressing room is unforgiving in the way that all dressing room lights are unforgiving. She looks exactly the same under it as she does in any other light, which is something else I have noted.

“Drinks order,” I say.